This week, I read the stories of tourists
to Italy who came as close as they dared to witnessing an erupting
volcano, Mount Etna. I saw the photographs of beachgoers ignoring the
distant evidence of smoke from an erupting geological time bomb.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/08/12/article-2025410-0D67C67200000578-138_634x421.jpg
I suppose similar minded tourists from Naples did the same some
twenty centuries ago when Mount Vesuvius glowed and emitted white plumes
into the sky before burying the cities of Herculenium and Pompeii.
This week, I read the story of a cow that was running through the
streets of Brooklyn, New York. Although Farm Sanctuary offered a home to
this creature, the animal was captured and slaughtered.

Dear Friends,
The flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Portland Oregon lasted six
hours.

On the plane, I read the rough draft version of "Eternal
Treblinka," an extraordinary book written by Charles Patterson that
equates the real life and death experiences of ten billion farm animals
raised each year for human consumption to the same Nazi atrocities
suffered by six million Jews who became Hitler's "Final Solution."
Eternal Treblinka is scheduled for a September, 2001 publication
date. This is one of the best written, best researched animal rights
books that I've ever had the pleasure to examine.

Fresh from the
memory of having read about Jews stuffed into cattle cars as they were
being transported to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Dachau, I
myself became witness to the twenty-first century's foremost example of
man's inhumanity to other living creatures. Our tortured kin. The animal
holocaust.

Last Thursday morning, I drove from Portland to Mount
St. Helens in Washington State. I had been attending the Raw Foods
Festival in Portland, and found a few hours in between my talks to visit
the scene of America's greatest natural volcanic disaster. On this hot
summer day, I drove across a bridge spanning the cascading Columbia
River, separating Portland from Vancouver. There next to my car was a
40-foot long silver van with holes large enough to see through.

Inside of the truck were dairy cows. They were packed tightly
together�with no room to lie down. The cows had served man's purpose.
Each individual lived her short lifetime of stress, first birthing a
child who would be immediately taken from her, then injected with
hormones that would painfully stretch her udder, depleting calcium from
her own bones so that she would generate enough milk to fill 100
half-pint containers for school children to drink each day. Her ancestors
naturally produced enough milk to have filled just four of those same
containers.

The cow whose eyes I look into for just one moment
would be made to suffer through hours or days of driving hundreds or
thousands of miles to what was to become a dairyman's final solution.
Yesterday she died a violent death shared by 10,000 of her sisters.
Today she will share that same fate with 10,000 other Guernsey and
Holstein cows on Route 80 or Route 66 or I-95, in Kansas, New Jersey, or
Florida, on highways and neighborhoods where your children and mine sleep
comfortably unaware of the predestined doom for living beings who have
done nothing to merit such treatment. Tomorrow the same, and the day
after that. Eternal death. Eternal slaughter. Eternal Treblinka.

A
holocaust occurs while meat eaters turn the other way, denying that such
horrors could possibly exist. Were the German and Polish people who knew
the fate of those trucked to Buchenwald and Treblinka any less moral
or guilty than those who comprehend the truth about what really happens
to farm animals?

I followed the truck for a bit until it veered off
to the left, and I continued my drive in another direction. I took the
high road, and she took the low road, and her look will forever haunt me.
Her body will produce 2,000 quarter-pounders for one of many fast food
franchises. Her anus and cheeks, arms and legs, back and udder will be
served so that others can have it their way. Today's slaughter will feed
20,000,000 people, and the year's tally of Elsie and her sisters will add
up to seven billion kids meals served.

I feel the slaughterhouse.
I hear the screams and know their fear. I smell the sweat and blood and
suffer their pain. I internalize the agony and distress of transported
animals. I envision the once green fields in which these animals
grazed and the cold metallic ramp and smell of warm sticky blood that
flows on the slaughterhouse floor and stains the psyche of us all.
I imagine the stun gun bolt to the head. The upside-down hoisting and
the sliced neck artery. The animal who chokes on her blood, and the
man who slices off her legs as she kicks in fear from the ensuing pain of
butchery. The last fifteen seconds of a death that no creature deserves.
The arrogance of a man who eats the flesh and dares not consider the
origin of each bite.

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer
once wrote about a man's love for his departed pet mouse:

"What do
they know�all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of
the world� about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man,
the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All
other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts,
to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis;
for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

I ceased eating meat
four years ago. I now look at my pet dog, whom my daughters rescued from
a shelter one day before she was due to be injected with man's final
solution. I have come to love her. Her name is Tykee, the goddess of
fortune. Is she unlike the baby lamb or calf who is separated from her
mother and shipped to the exterminator? I reflect on the Amazon parrot
who recognizes me and sings "hello" when I visit my parents. Does the
bird with green feathers differ significantly from the chicken with
white plumage?

Do they not feel pain and deserve the right to live? I
cannot eat them. I can no longer be the cause for their pain, although I
once was a part of their genocide. I once denied responsibility for the
acts of terror that occurred outside of my visi...outside of my
consciousness. Their bodies were cut into smaller pieces and were
broiled, baked, and fried.

Oh, that same crime of arrogance to which
I now plead guilty! My penitence? Community service. I explain the act
to meat eaters, and some turn their backs on me. Close their eyes. Shut
their ears. Who wishes to deal with the truth and reality of death?
Arriving at Mount St. Helens, I carefully read one plaque after
another, taking note of performances both heroic and ironic. I consider
the day that once silenced the birds and boiled to death fish in the
streams. A blink in the eye of geological time that stripped the
landscape of the color green, divested pine trees of their needles and
scattered whole trees like matchsticks across barren mountain tops.
I examined the original seismographs and warnings from hundreds of
scientists to the residents to evacuate their homes and come to terms
with an absolute truth.

I became dumfounded by the arrogance of one
man, Harry R. Truman, who lived alone in a cabin aside the lake below
a mountain that would soon explode with the magnitude and power
equivalent to 27,000 Hiroshima-type blasts.

A man who declined to
leave that mountain. A man who denied a truth shared by others. An
arrogant man who looked death in the face and refused to respect man's
destiny. I try to imagine his final moment of sensibility. At the same
time, in my own mind's eye I call upon the face of a cow in a truck on
a bridge.